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Biography of an Œuvre

A YOUTH SPENT IN A STUDIO

Alberto Giacometti grew up in Switzerland in the Val Bregaglia alpine valley, a few kilometers from the Swiss-Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933) was an impressionist painter esteemed by Swiss collectors and artists. He shared his thoughts with his son on art and the nature of art. Alberto Giacometti produced his first oil painting (Still Life with Apples, circa 1915) and first sculpted bust (Diego, circa 1914-1915) in his father's studioat the age of fourteen. His father and his godfather, the Symbolist painter Cuno Amiet (1868-1961) were two crucial figures in young Alberto’s artistic development. In 1922, Giacometti went to Paris to study, enrolling in the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, where he attended classes given by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. Drawings of nudes attest both to this apprenticeship and, like his earliest Cubist sculptures, to the influence of Jacques Lipchitz and Fernand Léger.

THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARTS OF AFRICA AND OCEANIA

Giacometti’s work shows the influence of African and Oceanian sculpture. When the young artist developed an interest in African art in 1926, it was no longer a novelty for the modern artists of the previous generation (Picasso, Derain); it had even become popularized to the point of becoming decorative. The two works which first brought Giacometti to the attention of the public were the Spoon Woman and The Couple, both shown in 1927 at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris, and both illustrating the upheaval created in the young artist by that cultural encounter. In 1928, Giacometti embarked on a series of women and flat heads, whose novel quality earned him acclaim in 1929, and resulted in his first contract with the Pierre Loeb gallery, which exhibited the Surrealists. In those years, Giacometti was friends with Carl Einstein, author of the seminal book on African sculpture, Negerplastik (1915) and Michel Leiris, who would become a specialist in Dogon art. Several later works, including some outstanding painted plasters and one or two paintings, show how non-western art had a lasting influence on his output. The artist moved away from naturalist and academic representation, in favour of a totemic and at times wild vision of the figure, filled with a magical power.

THE SURREALIST EXPERIMENT

Giacometti joined André Breton’s Surrealist movement in 1931, as an active member of Breton’s group, Giacometti in no time stood out as one of its rare sculptors. Despite his being expelled in February 1935, surrealist procedures continued to play an important part in his creative work: dreamlike visions, montage and assemblage, objects with metaphorical functions, and magical treatment of the figure. The Gazing Head, caught the attention of the group in 1929, and the Walking Woman of 1932, conceived as a model for the major Surrealist exhibition of 1933, in the version with neither arms nor head, featured in the 1936 Surrealist show in London. A painted version of the set construction titled The Palace at 4 a.m. conjures up the theatrical aspect of his dreamlike world. When, in 1965, Giacometti created a final version of the Suspended Ball for a retrospective in London, and by also providing a painted version of it, the artist showed how his links with the movement lived on.

OBJECTS

The creation of decorative art objects shows Giacometti’s interest in utilitarian objects which he admired in ancient and primitive societies. In 1931, Giacometti created a new typology of sculptures, which he called “mobile and mute objects” – things moving in a latent, suggestive way, which he had made of wood by a carpenter. Like the Disagreeable Object and the Disagreeable Object To Be Thrown Away, the Suspended Ball established a bridge between object and sculpture, and challenged the actual status of the work of art. In some of these sculptures, Giacometti had recourse, for the first time, to the procedure of the “cage”, which enabled him to delimit a dreamlike space of representation. From 1930 on, Giacometti created many utilitarian objects: lamps, vases, and wall lights which were sold by the avant-garde interior decorator Jean-Michel Frank. He also designed plaster and terra cotta bas-reliefs for special commissions – those on view here were made for an American collector, and the Louis-Dreyfus mansion in Paris. In 1939, he was one of the artists approached for a major commission by a couple of Argentinian collectors for whom he designed fire places, chandeliers, and console tables. Just before being dispatched to Buenos Aires, the complete décor, coordinated by Jean-Michel Frank, was installed in a life-size model in Paris. After the war, Giacometti went on creating other objects, including, in 1950, a lamp inspired by Dogon statuary and Egyptian funerary objects, and, in 1959, a scarf for a commission from his gallerist Aimé Maeght.

WHAT IS A HEAD ? THE DIMENSIONS OF REPRESENTATION

The issue of the human head was the central subject of Giacometti’s research throughout his life, as well as the reason for his exclusion of the Surrealist group in 1935. In that year, the representation of a head, which seemed to be a common-or-garden subject, was, for him, far from being resolved. The head and, above all, the eyes are the core of the human being and of life, whose mystery fascinated him. After the Head-Skull of 1934, developed after the death of his father Giovanni in 1933, his many different variations on heads show that the subject was inexhaustible, and all the more so if it was combined with the question of scale: for Giacometti, coming up with an exact rendering of his vision also meant providing the distance with which the subject had been looked at. In the 1930s, the models for his research into the head were his brother, Diego, an English artist friend, Isabel (Delmer), and a professional model, Rita (Gueyfier). Glimpsed from afar in the Quartier Latin, Isabel was the subject of one his very earliest miniature figurines. After his return to Paris from Switzerland in 1945, Giacometti once again showed that monumentality was separate from size, by making small-format portraits of important personalities: the patron of the arts Marie-Laure de Noailles, the writer Simone de Beauvoir, whom he had met in 1941, and, at Aragon’s request, the Resistance hero Rol-Tanguy.

A WOMAN LIKE A TREE, A HEAD LIKE A STONE

It was in Switzerland, where Giacometti spent the Second World War, that he had the idea in 1944-45 for the sculpture which would be the prototype for his postwar standing figures: the Woman with Chariot, which depicts the image of his English friend Isabel from memory. The sculpture of a standing figure, facing forward with her arms beside her body and her face expressionless, is a fine example of Giacometti’s research between 1945 and 1965 involving the space of representation: the figures were either set on pedestals which isolated them from the ground, or incorporated in “cages” forming a virtual space. Some compositions like The Glade were placed on flat surfaces raised above pedestal level – here, too, it was a matter of establishing a space parallel to ours. The standing female figures are allusive silhouettes, sometimes reduced to a line, and invariably approached by way of successive phases conveyed by series. The Four Women on a Base and Four Figurines on a Stand materialize two visions involving four standing women seen from a distance, and in different circumstances. With the Three Men Walking Giacometti tried to grasp in sculpture the fleeting sight of figures in motion. In 1950, Giacometti produced a series of sculptures conveying the image of a clearing where the trees were women and the stones men’s heads – an image which he would later push to its extreme, in a life-size piece.

FRAGMENTS AND VISIONS

Giacometti’s work studies the part as an evocation of the whole, and the emergence of a vision in the spectator’s space. In 1921 and 1946, Giacometti witnessed two deaths which left him with an indelible memory. At the bedside of the first dying person he was fascinated by his nose which seemed to him to grow longer as life ebbed away. In front of the corpse of the second person, he remembered the head tipped backwards, the open mouth, the skeletal limbs, and the terror felt at the idea that the dead was everywhere and that its hand might pass through the walls and reach him. Pursued by visions of heads suspended in the void, he strove to convey them in sculpture. He had been fascinated since boyhood by the human gaze, and the impression that life lies in the eyes was now heightened. Talking about those years, he declared: “I cannot simultaneously see the eyes, the hands, and the feet of a person standing two or three yards in front of me, but the only part that I do look at entails a sensation of the existence of everything.”

ENCOUNTERS

Giacometti met philosopher Jean-Paul Startre in 1941, who is the author of two essential essays about the artist’s work, published in 1948 and 1954, dealing with the issue of perception. Just as significant were his conversations with Sartre’s Japanese translator, Isaku Yanaihara, a professor of philosophy, who posed for Giacometti between 1956 to 1961. In 1948, keen to honour French intellectuals and artists, the French state commissioned Giacometti to design a medal dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre; the medal was never actually made, but there are drawings for it. Between 1951 and his death, Giacometti produced a series of “dark heads”, which, together with some anonymous sculpted heads, lent substance to the “generic” man concept, which Sartre would sum up, in 1964, in his novel Les mots, with the sentence: “A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him”. This was Giacometti’s quintessential contribution to the history of the portrait in the 20th century.

PORTRAITS

Giacometti’s portraits, be they painted or sculpted, are the translation of the model as an implacable otherness, which can never be grasped in its entirety. These portraits, devoid of all emotion and expression, are the receptacle of what the spectator brings to them. What was involved for the artist was capturing and rendering the vibration of the life of his models and not their psychology. Under Giacometti’s brush, his mother’s cook, Rita, became a sacerdotal character relieved of any sociological context.

His favourite models were people who lived around him: his wife Annette, whom he married in 1949, and Diego, his brother and assistant, who acted as a medium for his most advanced research. Working from memory, he brought forth their image within an imaginary space. Working from models, he turned his back on classical perspective and reconstructed his models posing as he saw them – in their fragmented or deformed, but ever-changing, aspect. Their distinctive features dissolved and sometimes merged, or were reduced to essentials. Giacometti also painted occasional models, as long as they agreed to pose for hours in front of him: the English industrialist and collector Sir Robert Sainsbury, the sophisticated intellectual Paola Carola-Thorel, and the artist Pierre Josse. Every modelling session gave rise to a new sequence of perceptions, which the artist sought to build up with his brush. Caroline, a pretty woman with a complex personality who hung out with criminals and posed from 1960 onwards, was presented in three very different aspects: a remote goddess, a dangerous and totemic figure, and a sculptural beauty.

FIFTY YEARS OF PRINTS

Giacometti produced his first prints – wood etchings – alongside his father when he was still a schoolboy. During his life, Giacometti tried his hand at every print technique: wood, engraving, etching, aquatint, and above all, lithography, from 1949 onward. As a witness at André Breton’s wedding in 1934, he illustrated the anthology offered by the poet to his young wife, L’Air de l’eau. Giacometti, who was a great book lover and friend of many writers and poets, also illustrated the writings of René Crevel (Les Pieds dans le Plat, 1933), Georges Bataille (Histoire de rats, 1947), Michel Leiris (Vivantes cendres, innommées, 1961), and René Char (Retour Amont, 1965). From 1951 onward, he produced lithographic plates which were separately published by the Maeght Gallery. Giacometti was always in favour of disseminating his work through quality editions. Lithography involving the transfer of a drawing onto a zinc plate offered the advantage of requiring lightweight equipment that was easy to handle: special paper and a lithographic pencil.The artist was thus able to leave his studio, go out into the street and sketch his city, café terraces, the overhead Metro, modern building sites like Orly airport, and the lithographer’s print shop, and then return to his studio. This would be the subject of Paris sans fin, a collection of 150 prints commissioned by the publisher Tériade, on which Giacometti worked from 1959 on, but which was not published until after his premature death.

LANDSCAPES

Giacometti creates a system of equivalences between the human figure and nature: the busts are mountains, the standing figures are trees, the heads are stones. In the sunlight, the mountain vibrates with a throb which resembles breathing. Like the tree, the human being is caught in a process of growth and death which can never be halted. This theme adorns the door which Giacometti finished making in 1956 for the vault of the Kaufmann family in Pennsylvania (United States). In 1958, gripped by a nighttime vision, he hurriedly painted a picture which brought together that trilogy: man, tree and mountain. For Giacometti, however, it was above all the most ordinary which contained the unknown and the wonderful. He observed that the landscape he painted from his studio window in Stampa was forever changing, and that he could “spend every day looking at the same garden, the same trees, and the same backdrop”, or, in Paris, remain in front of the small house, on the other side of the street, which he painted from his door. He was amazed by “all the beautiful landscapes to be painted without changing places, the most ordinary, anonymous, banal and beautiful landscape you could ever see.”

MONUMENT

In December 1958, through his New York dealer Pierre Matisse, Giacometti was invited to submit a project for a monument to be installed in the square being built in front of the new Chase Manhattan Bank skyscraper in Manhattan. In February 1959, the architect of this urban complex, Gordon Bunshaft, sent him the dimensions for making a model of the square, designed to help Giacometti to imagine the space, because the artist had never set foot in the United States. Giacometti decided to use, on a grand scale, the three motifs which had haunted his oeuvre since 1948: a gigantic standing female figure, a large walking man, and a monumental head set on the ground, all arranged in relation to each other. With this monument, for the first time, he permitted spectators to enter his wonderful world where trees were women and stones were heads, a magical glade criss-crossed by the fleeting forms of walking men. In the end, the monument was not installed in New York, because the artist backed out of the competition in 1961. Giacometti chose to produce each of the sculptures separately in bronze, and showed a first version of this set at the 1962 Venice Biennale. Another version was installed in 1964 in the Fondation Maeght’s courtyard overlooking a pine wood on the Côte d’Azur.

THE LAST MODEL

Eli Lotar, a film-maker and photographer, was Giacometti’s last male model. Lotar, a had been part of the Surrealist avant-garde in the 1930s. In the postwar years, he was dogged by failure and became destitute; he lived off the generosity of old friends like Giacometti, who gave him money in exchange for running small errands and posing. Giorgio Soavi has described these sessions, where Lotar had to remain absolutely still, as follows: “[Giacometti’s] eye was filled with strange gleams, his body vibrated in every limb, all he followed were the impulses which governed his hands, his arms, and his legs: he was in ecstasy. As I looked closely at the two faces, I understood the secret which enabled Lotar not to breathe: if Eli was the ideal model for that sculpture, it was because he was dead. He didn’t breathe, he didn’t think, he remained focused on the highest point. An electric current connected the artist to the model, wrapping them in a real complicity. They played together, without any ball, racket, or net.” In these sculptures, which evoke the reliquary and Egyptian statuary, the man who became a tramp was given the dignity of a priest. Jean Genet noted that, for Giacometti, women were goddesses and men priests “belonging to a very senior clergy”, all of them depending “invariably on the same haughty and gloomy family. Familiar and very close. Inaccessible.”

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